Meet the BBC Natural History Unit's kit-hacking specialists

This article was taken from the March 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online.

Film crews get tense when they can sense a kill.

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It's October 2013, and members of a BBC Natural History Unit (NHU) film crew have fallen silent. A docile creature is ambling along, seemingly unaware that it is being tracked by a pack of fast, silent killers. These predators are relentless and ruthless, able to strip a corpse in seconds flat... But, just as the first attacker lunges in for the kill, something unexpected happens -- the prey's ample rump appears to explode, spraying noxious, boiling hot liquid on to the hapless predators, which are killed or dispersed. Mike Gunton is delighted: the crew nailed the shot. An experienced wildlife-documentary producer and director, Gunton is the executive producer on Survival, a six-part series that features the existential battles of some of the world's most unusual animals. Not only that, the bombardier beetle (with internal chambers containing two different compounds which, when mixed with catalytic enzymes, act as an explosive means of defence) and the pack of ants it defeated were captured in 3D, despite being small enough to fit on to the camera operator's finger.

Shooting in 3D and in close-up required a complex hack -- so the BBC turned to Oscar-winning cameraman Peter Parks to help develop the Zero Scope

Charlie Surbey

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Gunton explains that filming in 3D requires two cameras positioned side-by-side to mimic the ocular distance of human eyes. The trouble is, when filming tiny creatures, it's necessary to position the cameras incredibly close together -- closer than is physically possible. The device the team is using today is called the Zero Scope: a hack that combines mirrors positioned to create the effect of the camera lenses being zero centimetres apart. These are connected to a 3D camera pointed at a slab of mud about the size of a large basketball, situated beneath enormous studio lights. A crew of lighting and camera technicians surrounds the whole construction -- like gods gazing down over their newly formed planet, as mutant creatures battle to the death before their eyes.

A tarantula shot in 3D for 'Hidden Kingdoms' using the hacked Zero Scope -- two tiny lenses at the end of a long metal arm attached to two cameras

Charlie Surbey

Gunton, who is creative director of the NHU -- the biggest wildlife-documentary maker in the world, producing some 150 hours of radio and television every year -- explains that this kind of improvised arrangement is crucial to the success of what's also known as the wildlife unit. Currently, the unit has 20 projects in production, with teams scattered across the globe, meaning that, for Gunton -- a scruffy, blond, bespectacled and genial 55-year-old enthusiast -- thinking innovatively is essential for success. "We always want to film the unseeable," he says. "It's all about elaborate problem-solving, seat-of-the-pants improvisation -- always looking to give new twists to coverage of species we've seen many times before and finding ways to film species that no-one's trained a camera on yet."

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Hacking, Gunton argues, has always been in the unit's DNA -- it was one of the first to put cameras in the field in the 50s. But there is a difference between hard hacking and soft hacking. Now, he explains, hard hacking means effectively creating a new device with pieces of kit that may have been designed for something else entirely. Soft hacking, on the other hand, is twisting existing kit way beyond the limits its makers imagined. "A lot of these guys," -- he waves at the team -- "as well as being fantastic artists, they have to be very technically savvy. And also they have a lot of time sitting out in the wild thinking when nothing's happening, wondering how they could get a better shot."

The NHU has pioneered thermal imaging, time-lapse and HDTV, and -- using the high-speed Phantom camera, which can shoot 2,000 frames per second -- it has made discoveries; for instance, how a chameleon's tongue isn't sticky but muscular, wrapping itself around its prey rather than adhering to it. And yet, the studio they work in couldn't be less like a tech company campus if it tried. When WIRED arrives at the studio, Gunton and assistant producer/director Sophie Lanfear stuff us into a cab and take us deep into the Somerset countryside to a slightly dilapidated old barn on a fully working farm.

The experimental, suck-it-and-see approach of the unit's fieldwork, where state-of-the-art cameras are ripped to pieces and reassembled, makes the enterprise feel both eccentric and experimental. In the past few years, the unit has stripped down Super 8 cameras and attached one to the back of a golden eagle. In 2010, it adapted a remote-controlled Bradley Cam-Ball -- a small, rugged camera with a CCTV-feel designed for shots from an ice-hockey net -- for its Africa series, covering one with faeces to film wild dogs. In the marshy Bangweulu wetlands in northern Zambia, camouflaged versions of the camera were smuggled on to the floating nests of the stork-like shoebill, where they filmed brutal siblingcide. "Shoebills lay two eggs, which hatch a week apart," says Gunton. "The mother feeds both until it's clear the first-born will survive and then basically ignores the second chick, as it was really just an insurance policy. At that stage the elder chick attacks the younger -- ultimately killing it. We wanted to get a sense of the tension within the nest when suddenly one chick becomes a maniac and one becomes a victim. This allowed us to get a shot from the chick's perspective. You could tilt up and look up at the mother as she was feeding one and not the other -- a really sinister feeling."

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Gunton has a degree in zoology and a doctorate in behavioural anatomy. As a teenager he experimented with a Super 8 camera and, while at Cambridge, sold short films about life at the university to Japanese businessmen. He ended up at the BBC after shooting a trip to Sri Lanka. Lanfear, whose stepfather was an RAF Tornado pilot, grew up on military bases around Europe. When she was 19 she spent a year working for the Norwegian military "taking off-the-shelf technology and adapting it for the White House and the Pentagon". "The military wasn't my thing," admits the tall, athletic 30-year-old. "They needed English speakers to liaise with the Americans, [and] it gave me money for filming wildlife, which was always my passion."

Her first stills camera, a Canon, broke when she took it to Svalbard, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. "It froze," Lanfear says. "It was so cold -- like minus 40 degrees or something -- and you're supposed to keep it in your jacket. The electronics components froze so the shutter didn't work... It was my first lesson, I guess."

The money saved from liaising with the Pentagon allowed Lanfear to spend six months in Africa before studying psychology and zoology. She then spent a year at Cambridge University's Kalahari Meerkat Project in South Africa, where she was discovered by the NHU when it arrived to film 2005's Meerkat Manor. "Meerkats are A-listers," Lanfear explains, sipping a coffee in the barn. "People love them because you can anthropomorphise them very easily -- plus they're very cute and charismatic. And so they've been filmed to death. How do you bring something new to this?"

The answer was to hack a Steadicam. The device has been around since 1975, when Hollywood cameraman Garrett Brown balanced a camera around an ultra-low-friction gimbal to absorb the small body movements of the operator. The full Steadicam rig is extremely bulky: "Cameramen love the rig, because it makes them look good, right?" says Lanfear, laughing. "They're dressed like RoboCop and feel all manly when they put it on."

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In 2011, however, Oakley-sunglasses millionaire Jim Jannard's RED digital camera company produced the Epic -- a 5K-pixel camera the size of a DSLR. "The Epic is so small, you could turn the whole Steadicam kit upside down so the lens is literally two centimetres off the floor -- meerkat height," Lanfear explains. "But no one had done it before -- no one knew it was possible."

Lanfear and cameraman Toby Strong played around with various rigs for a few days, shooting toy lions to trial a set-up. They added a cmotion Follow Focus system -- a wireless focus puller -- to keep images clear in rapidly moving action sequences, but still weren't sure of its effectiveness until, in the field, they shot a gang of meerkats mobbing a king cobra. "The thing you have to remember about natural-history filming is that the animals don't actually know the script," explains Lanfear. "So when you're having something like a cobra being mobbed, you don't want to mess that up. You're using tech that's never been in the field, trying to direct, pull focus -- 'did we get that?' It isn't until afterwards that you watch it back and realise you're OK. Phew..."

Hacking the RED Epic has proved to be the unit's favourite hobby. Recently, a team overcame huge obstacles to shoot the long-eared jerboa in the Gobi Desert. The Gobi is vast, inhospitable, mountainous and is whipped by sand storms. Temperatures oscillate wildly from -5°C at night to 40°C in the midday Sun. The tiny, nocturnal long-eared jerboas -- less than ten centimetres long, slight, sandy coloured -- live underground in heavily disguised burrows.

Footage is rare -- prior to the NHU's shoot, the animal had been caught on camera just twice, by Russian scientists. The unit avoids using artificial light at night as it changes the animals' behaviour. So for the Gobi, Lanfear took a RED Epic Monochrome, a black-and-white camera with a sensor that can film 300 frames per second (to put that into context, the iPhone films at 25 frames per second). She took out the cut-pass filter -- which removes infrared light from camera chips as it can blur colour images. Infrared, however, adds sensitivity to night shoots.

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The Bradley Camera Cam-Ball 2 is effectively a surveillance camera created for the TV industry

BBC

The five-week shoot was based in a derelict building near an oasis, days from the nearest city. There was no running water, an open cesspit, sandstorms and extreme temperatures. Lanfear's RAF background helped both with the degree of hardiness required and an openness to experimenting with military-spec hardware that is shared by many members of the NHU.

Mike Gunton, creative director of BBC Natural History Unit

Charlie Surbey

Nick Turner, 40, is a freelance cameraman, a partner in a local company Tshed and one of a large number of cottage industry film technology pioneers who gravitate around the unit's headquarters, selling kit and skills, and developing many of the unit's new tools. "In Bristol there are lots of people in sheds, making their own equipment," Turner says. "We kind of cater to the esoteric end of wildlife filmmaking, with specialist filming equipment that isn't really available off the shelf. They're often one-offs made for a particular purpose -- to film things that can't or haven't been filmed before -- and we have to try to invent something to get a particular kind of shot."

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Turner specialises in night shoots, and the camera he's holding -- slightly bigger than the state-of-the-art digital cameras, with an unusually long, white lens -- is technically a restricted item under the US Arms Export Control Act. In fact, sharing it with or selling it to Middle Eastern, Chinese or Iranian broadcasters could get him four years in jail.

Sophie Lanfear, executive producer of the Survival series

Charlie Surbey

It's called a Starlight camera for fairly obvious reasons -- it can film solely by the light of the stars. Turner built the camera using a very high-resolution, large-image intensifier coupled with an incredibly powerful sensor. This can take a single photon of light and electronically multiply its effects until you can see by moonlight as clearly as if it were the middle of the day -- and in 1080 HD output. "The first image intensifiers were used in night-vision goggles in Vietnam," Turner explains. "We've been trying to link them to high-definition night-vision technology for years -- there wasn't really the combination of camera and sensor and image intensifier to make it work. In 2007 we heard about a camera in the US, developed off the back of a defence contract, and a European company with the same image intensifiers in modern US military night vision equipment. We added our own electronics, we rewrote the software, stripped it down for a PDA... it's a proper combination of men in sheds and defence technology," he says cradling the device. "There are only two in the world."

The Starlight's footage is precise, detailed and black-and-white -- clearer than thermal-imaging cameras showing heat signatures. Turner filmed pioneering footage of lions tracking elephants at night -- showing how the lions avoid moonlight and how nervous antelope become when they can't see and their senses get confused. "It's stuff we'd never have known without this tech," he says.

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Gemma Brandt, researcher on the Hidden Kingdoms series

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That could be the unit's motto -- seeing stuff we'd never have known without all this tech. It sounds better in Latin: Ut nulla res unquam sine videre. Right now, technicians are experimenting with Octocopters on shoots for Survival, which will be broadcast later this year, and another show, Wild Rainforest. For Survival, the flying devices are being used to show the pointless preening of the blackbuck, an Indian antelope. The males gather in groups known as leks, and build individual little mounds, which they each stand on and defend despite there being no value to the exercise other than attracting the attention of females. "It's beautiful but ridiculous," Gunton explains. "The most powerful males will build and defend the best ones -- but the mound really doesn't mean anything. We wanted to get the sense, from the air, of how there are a couple of dozen of these males, all separated out on their leking mounds, and how they stand there for hours and hours and hours in the baking hot Sun -- almost like statues."

The team took a leaf out of the US military's drone warfare book, and adapted a surveillance UAV to carry the RED camera, which, with lenses, costs £30,000. The team had tried model helicopters in the past, but they proved hard to control and crashed regularly. So Gunton hired an experienced US drone pilot to teach the camera teams how to fly.

Mark Brownlow, series producer of Hidden Kingdoms series

Charlie Surbey

The stability of the Octocopter means that some of the footage appears almost impossible, as if it has been rendered in CGI. In Wild Brazil, for instance, there's an establishing shot that starts way above the canopy and swoops down through the trees until it reaches a bubbling river -- then follows the river upstream. No crane or helicopter could have managed it. "It's had variable success," Gunton says. "We didn't get every shot that we wanted. Sometimes you have to retro-fit and say 'OK, what editorial will that deliver?' The UAV is going to deliver a surveillance look so we exploit that to give the audience a voyeuristic sense of peeking through the window at what's going on."

tanding outside the barn in Somerset, starring across the misty fields, WIRED can't help feeling that there's something missing -- the technology is ingenious. But where is that staple of the wildlife programme, the big-cat kill? Sharing a sandwich with the crew, we bring up the cheetah -- our favourite feline: adaptive technology (all muscle groups focused on speed rather than strength, dislocatable shoulders for extra reach) and disruptive business model (fur shading counters Sun blindness, allowing daytime kills). At which point Nick Easton shows us the Gyrocam.

The young assistant-producer/director's problem was the very same, famously fast big cat. When you think of cheetahs hunting, you think of the plains of the Serengeti, the high-speed chase, the fall, the kill. But cheetahs actually live in all sorts of different terrain across Africa. They've been filmed in grasslands and deserts but never in woodland -- partly because of the difficulty of filming them in that habitat. "I was thinking, 'OK, walking alongside is going to look great,' but the moment they run, all you'll get is a bounding crazy image and you can't get through the trees with a huge Steadicam rig," Easton explains. "Then I heard about the Gyro -- they were made for drama shoots looking for hand-held shots walking through towns where you might be getting jostled. The BBC had one, so I tracked it down and hacked it."

He proudly offers a small camera with a bulky black block attached. Usually a Gyro -- essentially a wheel spinning at thousands of RPM to stabilise the shot -- would come with a large rig, but he stripped everything away until he was left with a handle and a Gyro rig screwed straight into the bottom of the camera. "Essentially it's like the Gyros they use to stabilise aerial images, but it's a micro version," he says. "Whereas in an aerial rig, you might have eight gyros, this is just two gyros in a kind of lozenge. It needs a certain combination of lens and battery to make sure it's actually balanced - a RED camera with a 17-50mm lens and an IDX V-lock battery. You can walk with the camera and it takes out the rocking side-to side and back to front. Like a very light Steadicam."

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Easton took the handheld camera to Zimbabwe and tracked the cheetahs with two cameras -- his handheld Gyro device and a second safety camera. When they saw the cheetahs hunting, they'd scout for the prey, take a traditional wide shot with the second camera and then stalk alongside the cheetah with the Gyro, getting a steady, constant shot even as the cats and crew broke into a run, darting in and out of the trees.

BBC

The film -- which will be broadcast as part of the Survival series -- is breathtaking. The two cheetahs have their sights on a male impala. They weave in and out of trees before getting a straight stretch for 20 metres where they catch up and pounce. The impala has two powerful horns that will gut the attackers if they misstep by a fraction. The cheetahs move like a team -- they trip the impala and fasten on to it; one hangs on to its back and the other sinks her teeth into its throat. Yet the impala remains on its feet for almost 15 minutes. "As soon as the hunt kicked off I turned the Gyro on," Easton explains. "The camera's only a few centimetres off the ground and we're only a couple of metres away throughout the whole thing. You have never seen anything like this before." He laughs and -- unconsciously -- quotes the Victorian impresario PT Barnum's slogan for his touring three-ring circus when it first hit London: "It's the greatest show on Earth."

Stephen Armstrong wrote about The New Financiers in 09.13. You can watch NHU video footage in this issue's iPad edition

This article was first published in the March 2014 issue of WIRED magazine